Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics & the Life of a Water Poet

June 24, 2010

Another Bit of Diss

As I have laid
them out, three strands unify “Boomtown:” place and history, cooking, and
ghosts. All three, I believe, lend themselves to ecopoetic exploration.
However, the last section (“I Let Down My Anchor in the Land Around Me”) is the
part of the book that engages most clearly with the strand of ecopoetics that
insists on the phenomenological engagement and reportage that Scigaj, Gilcrest,
and Bryson (among others) look for in ecopoetry. This engagement and reportage
is a full-body experience of the world that engages the non-verbal parts of the
brain, an experience which is then available for writing. But even at the
moment of phenomenological engagement I am concerned, like Neil Evernden in his
book TheSocial Creation of Nature, with the ways that human life frames and
informs non-human nature (e.g., “At 27th and Capitol Parkway” and
“Storm Runoff”). It is a poor literary movement that cannot range across the
variety of human experience, assuming as I think we must that poems are meant
for a human audience. “Flights of July,” for example, explores the kind of
interaction with non-human nature that most Americans are likely to have in a
suburban (or perhaps even urban) ecotone: in the midst of some human-defined
task, a homeowner encounters a wasp. The non-human around us has found a way to
coexist, however uneasily that coexistence might be balanced. Poems throughout
the book—from “On Ancient History” with its deep historical sweep, through
“Wife Speaks” with her concerns about her environment, on to “Seeds of Victory
Ensure the Fruits of Peace” which ties the local garden to global events, to
“Boulevard Trees” and “Local Flocks” with their details grounded in nature, and
on into the last section—all these poems are unified in their exploration of
non-human nature. Thus, the ecopoetics of “Boomtown” relies on a variety of
contexts and strategies to build a book that in its individual poems might not
be immediately recognizable as ecopoems.

Leslie Paul Thiele
has two terms that I have found useful in considering this balance as I drafted
the book: interdependence (the notion that humans are webbed into relationships
with their history and future, with other life on the planet, and with other
humans), and coevolution (thinking and acting interdependently; that is, we're
moving forward along with these other relationships) (xxiii). What “Boomtown”
seeks to do with ecopoetry is to make explicit the coevolutionary condition. It
can be far too easy to forget or ignore the historical and non-human aspects of
the places in which we live. The demands and clamoring of our own desires, our
schedules, the quotidian, all of these easily command more attention than lives
at the margins of our awareness or than the events of fifty or a hundred years
ago. But those other lives, the non-human constraints of geography, the choices
of our forebears, all of these shape our choices and behavior. Ecopoetry
returns our attention to those issues. Reading ecopoems can help us to consider
where we are—however far away we might be from the setting of those particular
poems—in ways similar to how metaphor works: the tenor is not the vehicle, but
we understand each better when they’re brought together. “Boomtown,” then,
should have larger resonances beyond Lincoln, and I read Thiele as arguing for
“web” in a large, planetary sense.

In working on this
piece, it was hard to ignore the influence of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S.
1 (the first section in particular). This manuscript bears witness to the
strategies all three employ, but “Boomtown” differs significantly from all
three. Both Paterson and the salient
section of U.S. 1 have much longer
poems (and a much higher degree of interpolation from other sources), though
each book breaks up easily into smaller divisions. I also kept returning to Gary
Snyder’s Danger on Peaks, which
offered the structural idea of small poems revealing aspects of a life, though
in my own book the life has become the history of a small city.

Somewhat
less obvious will be the influence of Arthur Sze. The poems in The Red-Shifting Web and Quipu offer a model for how poetry can
engage multiple topics, agendas, and registers both emotional and intellectual simultaneously.
Short poems such as “Syzygy” and “Oracle-Bone Script” move quickly through
these registers, but it’s in the longer pieces that Sze’s strategies become
truly important. His title poem, “Quipu,” uses couplets, cinquains, isolated
single lines, and tercets its nine sections to model the knotted record-strings
of the Mayans after which the poem is named. The first section seems to speak
to the strategies of his book with these lines: “And as a doe slips across the
road behind us, / we zigzag when we encounter a point of resistance, // zigzag
as if we describe the edge of an immense leaf, / as if we plumb a jagged
coastline where tides // wash and renew the mind” (27). The poem moves
fractally (movement patterns become leaf patterns become coastline) as it
explores the issue of conception and miscarriage. Throughout, the work remains
poetically interesting, intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling,
especially to me as I was writing.

And
there are other voices that murmur in the background. W.S. Merwin offered ways for
nonhuman nature to creep into and overlap with human life. I also struggled
toward his more relaxed, unpunctuated line as well as the relationship of that
line to the rest of the poem. A poem like “So Far,” with its neatly formed
cinquains is a good example. In that poem, the narrative of the newly hatched
gecko stumbles across lines much like the lizard itself stumbles across a floor.
The story is interrupted by brief diversions into setting and science (“a
species rare if not officially / endangered named for one man Rumphius”)
(85-86). While less driven by elliptical associations than Sze’s poetry, his
poems still range widely over a loose line. I was drawn to William Stafford’s
sense of the line, too, though with punctuation. I default to a very short line
of few beats, so Stafford offered a useful model. His “Traveling Through the
Dark” is the most famous instance, but a poem like “Vocation” that starts
“[t]his dream the world is having about itself / includes a trace on the plains
of the Oregon trail” (102) has five strong beats across a mostly iambic line.
The rhythm swings steadily, subtly, an effect I was trying to emulate in “At
Play with Such Fervor, Such Strange Feelings” and “At 27th and
Capitol Parkway,” among others. The influence of both Merwin and Stafford reverberate
throughout “Boomtown.”

Like
Stafford, Sandra Alcosser writes her body on to the page, a practice which
moves her close to the phenomenological ideal that Scigaj and other critics
admire. While I have not consulted her other work much (though there is much to
admire in Except by Nature), the idea
of the body remained important to me. Characters in “Boomtown” are, mostly,
embodied, with the obvious exception of the ghosts. Lastly, while the first
section of her book is set in Louisiana, the second section offers details from
her life growing up in South Bend, Indiana, and the last section is filled with
explorations of non-human nature (in poems like “Spittle Bug” and
“Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel”). Her interest in the natural world makes her
an obvious model. Although not writing about the Midwest, A.R. Ammons allows
nature a kind of place in his poetry that is hard not to admire. In particular,
I am delighted by how nature appears in quite familiar settings. For example,
from “The Imagined Land” we read that “I want a squirrel-foil for my martin
pole” (260). He brings in the language of science, too, as well as the quick,
easy rhythms of informal, spoken English.